Monthly Archives: June 2011

After over a year of not sharing my work, I’ve decided that it’s time to start again. I played around with the idea of posting my work here, but in the end decided against it. If you are interested, head over to www.courtneydipaola.com. Any and all input is welcome and appreciated!

Illustrations by Greg Constantine, from his book Vincent Van Gogh Visits New York. It is a fun game for fans of art history to pick out who’s who. Head over to Michael Sporn’s Splog to see the rest!

I’ve had this Chuck Close quote saved on my computer for months, and seeing as Chuck Close was included in Constantine’s illustrations, I finally have an excuse to share it:

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

If I have not yet convinced you to add Andreas Deja’s new blog to your bookmark list, perhaps these will do it:

These drawings are by John Lounsbery, one of Walt Disney’s ‘Nine Old Men’, and one of my favorite animators. The characters, of course, are one of the Italian chefs from Lady and the Tramp and the wolf from The Sword in the Stone.

Please do yourself a favor and head over to Deja View. What I have posted is only a tiny sampling of all the wonderful drawings Andreas Deja has posted. Take a look!